The Royal Society of Tasmania invites you to a lecture by senior member of the Tasmanian Palawa community, Kerry Sculthorpe, at 3pm on Sunday 30 July 2023. The lecture will be held at the Stanley Burbury Lecture Theatre, University of Tasmania, Sandy Bay, Hobart.

To attend in person, please register using this Eventbrite link. Eventbrite registrations close at 3pm on Saturday 29 July.

To view the livestream, please register using this Zoom link.

Admission is free, and everyone is welcome to attend.

The presentation will reflect on some of the key moments which preceded the Uluru Statement and offer insights into the wider context in which it was formulated. It will advance some ideas about what a Voice might look like and how it might operate. It will offer a personal view of the consequences of a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’ win in the referendum.

Kerry Sculthorpe is a senior member of the Palawa community. Her involvement in community affairs has spanned more than forty years. She has experience in policy and administration. Kerry has held elected and appointed positions at the community level and has been a strong advocate for Aboriginal rights. She is a former senior executive of the Australian Public Service and more recently has served on the government’s Voice co-design committee considering local and regional arrangements. In her retirement Kerry tries to get her opinions on Aboriginal issues published in the newspapers.

The Royal Society of Tasmania invites you to the lectures by the two winners of the 2023 Peter Smith Medal, Dr Rachel Climie and Dr Vipul Gupta, at 3 pm, on Sunday, 6 August 2023. The lectures will be held at the Geology Lecture Theatre (Geo 211.LT), Earth Sciences – Geography, Planning and Special Sciences Building, University of Tasmania, Sandy Bay (entrance off Earl Street, Hobart).

Please register to attend using this Eventbrite link. Registrations close at 3 pm on Saturday 5 August. The lecture will be recorded but not live-streamed.

Admission is free for members of the Royal Society of Tasmania. Non-members are welcome, and donations are appreciated through our website or at the door. Suggested donation is $6; $4 for students and friends of TMAG and QVMAG.

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Cardiovascular health in early life
Dr Rachel Climie

Despite major improvements in risk factor control and clinical care over the last decades, cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains the leading cause of death worldwide. Although overt CVD may not appear until later in life, the risk factors for CVD begin to develop in childhood and are associated with adverse outcomes in adulthood. Importantly, these risk factors are increasing in prevalence in Australian children, particularly in those who come from areas of social disadvantage.

Rachel’s work aims to identify the determinants of cardiovascular health in childhood and their association with future health; establish tools to detect early CVD risk in young people; and develop effective and acceptable strategies to improve CVH of children who come from social disadvantage, with a particular focus on regions of Tasmania.

Dr Rachel Climie is Research Fellow at the UTAS Menzies Institute for Medical Research, an Exercise Physiologist and advocate for public health. After completing her PhD at UTAS in 2016, Rachel was awarded two internationally competitive fellowships for postdoctoral training in France. Rachel was then awarded a Heart Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship to return to Australia and the Heart Foundation’s Paul Korner Award for most innovative postdoctoral fellowship application. In 2022, Rachel was awarded an NHMRC Emerging Leader Fellowship (<10% success rate) and Heart Foundation Future Leader Fellowship (<15% success rate). Rachel has received over $3.9M ($1.8M CIA) in competitive national and international grant funding. She has published >70 peer-reviewed (39 first/senior author) papers. Rachel has received 7 international and 6 national awards in recognition for her work including Victorian Young Tall Poppy Award for excellence in research and science communication and High Blood Pressure Research Council of Australia Young Investigator Award for best scientific presentation by a young researcher.

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Transforming 3D Printing from Rapid Prototyping to Advanced Manufacturing
Dr Vipul Gupta

Manufacturing advancements in every sector, from health, energy, and aerospace to defence, demand modern additive manufacturing techniques like 3D printing. However, these methods have been predominantly limited to rapid prototyping because they are mostly restricted to plastic manufacturing, offer a low resolution, and fail to produce multi-material structures. Hence, our research is focused on developing new 3D printing materials and methods to overcome these three limitations.

Vipul’s recent work has focused on developing new materials and methods to 3D print one of the most attractive and hard-to-manufacture classes of materials, glass and ceramics, while offering nanometre scale feature resolution and multi-material print capabilities. The developed inks and printers have been the subject of six patent applications in the last two years and are now realising holy grail products, such as wearable universal sensors, high-efficiency hydrogen fuel cells, comprehensive air and water filters, and environmental pollution remediation systems, to effect socio-economic progress.

Dr Gupta graduated from the UTAS School of Natural Sciences (Chemistry Discipline) in September 2018. During his PhD, he has represented Tasmania at different national and international platforms, such as Lindau Noble Laureate Meeting and Australian Socio-economic discussion forums. Since graduating, he has contributed towards securing research funding of ca. 6.5 million dollars through different ARC grants, including a highly prestigious ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA) Fellowship. He is co-author of 30 peer-reviewed publications from his graduate and four years of post-graduate research. The impact and significance of his research have earned him 18 awards and honours an invitation to the Science at the Shine Dome, and Science and Industry Endowment Fund – Australian Academy of Science (SIEF-AAS) Fellowship to the Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting.

The Royal Society of Tasmania invites you to a lecture by Tasmanian Aboriginal leader, lawyer, author and activist, Michael Mansell, at 3pm on Sunday 2 July 2023. The lecture will be held at the Stanley Burbury Lecture Theatre, University of Tasmania, Sandy Bay, Hobart.

To attend in person, please register using this Eventbrite link. Eventbrite registrations close at 3pm on Saturday 1 July.

To view the livestream, please register using this Zoom link.

Admission is free and everyone is welcome to attend.

The presentation will centre around the debate about Aboriginal self-determination, giving Aboriginal people direct decision making as opposed to Aboriginal subordination (advising others to make decisions about us).

Michael Mansell is a Tasmanian Aboriginal leader who, as an activist and lawyer, has worked for social, political and legal changes to improve the lives and social standing of Tasmanian Aboriginal people.

The 2007 eruption of Piton de la Fournaise on Reunion Island was one of the largest for the past two centuries and remarkably complex, involving multiple events at different locations and contrasting eruption styles. Nevertheless, analysis of the eruption records and the products has revealed spatial and temporal connections among the different events and styles that were fundamentally controlled by the magma supply

Jocelyn McPhie is a volcanologist and for most of her career (1990 to 2015), she held an academic position at the University of Tasmania. Since retiring from the university, she has been consulting to the minerals industry, providing technical advice and professional training in volcanology. She maintains an adjunct position with the University of Tasmania, continuing to supervise PhD students and to participate in r­­­­esearch projects. She became a member of the Royal Society of Tasmania in 2020 and President in 2022.

Synthetic gene drives cause significant deviations from Mendel’s Law of Equal Segregation, enabling specific genes to increase in prevalence in populations of sexually reproducing organisms, even if these genes incur a fitness cost. In the laboratory, gene drives have suppressed caged populations of human malaria vector mosquitoes in less than 12 generations (about 3 months) raising the prospect of a powerful new genetic method for eliminating malaria from regions such as Africa where the disease kills more than half a million people each year, 80% of which are children under five. In this presentation, Dr. Keith Hayes describes the methods used by his team to assess the environmental and human health risks associated with a strategy of staged releases of genetically modified mosquitoes in Burkina Faso, designed to culminate in the first field trials of gene-drive-modified mosquitoes to eliminate malaria vector populations at a continent-wide scale.

Dr Keith Hayes is a senior research scientist at CSIRO Data61, and leads the Data61 Ecological and Environmental Risk Assessment (DEERA) team in the Hobart laboratories (https://data61.csiro.au/en/Our-Research/Programs-and-Facilities/Analytics-and-decision-sciences/DEERA). The team conducts probabilistic risk assessments, and supporting studies, typically for challenging problems across large spatio-temporal scales. Recent applications include hazard analysis and risk assessments for genetic control of malaria vectors in Africa (https://fnih.org/our-programs/geneconvene/technical-advice), cumulative risk assessments of the impacts of new coal resource developments on water resources and water-dependent assets (http://www.bioregionalassessments.gov.au/), and risk assessments for the spread of antimicrobial resistance (https://outbreakproject.com.au/). Dr Hayes recently assisted the Australian federal government to design a Monitoring Evaluation Reporting and Improvement (MERI) framework for Australia’s Marine Parks and is now leading a subsequent project to implement this framework.

This lecture focuses on Tasmania’s acclimatization experience with British animals and birds, with particular reference to the Tasmanian Acclimatisation Society formed in 1862. Acclimatisers were motivated to introduce birds like pheasants, partridges and quail and animals like rabbits, hares and deer for game hunting and hares for the sport of coursing. Birds like sparrows and starlings were introduced for the familiarity of their songs and for their insect killing abilities. When introduced animals and birds reacted in unpredictable ways, they demonstrated the limits of scientific knowledge, how adaptable they were and how vulnerable native species and the Tasmanian landscape were to the new arrivals. The lecture ends by critical assessing acclimatisation’s impact by the 1890s.

Emeritus Professor Stefan Petrow taught Australian, Tasmanian, European and family history at the University of Tasmania until his retirement in June 2020. His research interests include all aspects of Tasmanian history, but he has had a longstanding focus on legal history, cultural history and health, urban and town planning history of Hobart and Launceston. His books include Sanatorium of the South? (1995) and (with Carey Denholm) Dr. Edward Swarbreck Hall: Colonial Medical Scientist and Moral Activist (2016). His most recent book (March 2023) is Look After The Missus and Kids: A History of Hobart Legacy 1923-2023. He has completed a book manuscript called Tasmanian Anzacs, Families and The Impact of World War One: Volume 1: The 12th and 52nd Battalions.